Ms Janet Kamau Thiongo, Marketing Manager, Africa. PHOTO | COURTESY
What you need to know:
Modern marketers have to work on two dimensions: typical demographics and Digital Body Language.
Marketers must digitize to survive and close the gap between today’s ‘real’ marketing and the ‘ideal.’
While the concept of knowing your customer is not new, today’s modern marketers know that there are two dimensions that they have to work on: typical demographics and the buyer’s Digital Body Language.
This is because they need to know the actionable behaviour that predicts how a prospect is going to buy, as well as attributes that identify their makeup.
Although the marketing landscape has evolved to be very complex, at the core everything that we’ve always known about marketing is the same.
Marketers must digitize to survive and close the gap between today’s ‘real’ marketing and the ‘ideal.’ To do that we need to look at the past, learn from it and build on it.
Below are the 5 Tenets of Modern Marketing, derived from Oracle’s Eloqua study with BtoB Magazine, that every modern marketer should employ:
Targeting: Marketers have always understood that it’s better to know more about their customer. But today’s modern marketers accomplish this by blending demographics with Digital Body Language, or the attributes that make up a prospect’s behavioral profile. Tomorrow’s modern marketers will have to accomplish the trifecta of answering the questions: ‘Who are You, What do you Do, and Who do You Trust.’
Engagement: The first rule of being interesting is to first be interested in your audience. Today’s modern marketers engage effectively by using the concepts of personalized content to match ‘offers’ to ‘interests’. Tomorrow’s modern marketers will have to use the same concept of personalized content, but it will need to show up in every channel and/or location that the buyer frequents.
Conversion: Since the beginning of time, every marketer has known they have to turn their programmes into revenue. Today’s modern marketers accomplish this by knowing the customer’s buying cycle, engaging the buyer all the way through the buying cycle, and delivering qualified leads.
Analytics: Measurement always has been a core component of determining marketing effectiveness. Today’s modern marketers need to have reports on key attributes about the buyer, channel, and offer, to understand what works and what does not. Tomorrow’s modern marketers need to have real-time ‘What If’ analytics to anticipate change, as well as real-time benchmarking solutions.
Technology: No one can predict what the next cool channel or technology will be. But the platform of the future has to be purpose built to make it easy for new technologies and channels to be integrated into the daily life of the marketer.
The reason why Tom Cruise works quickly in the movie ‘Minority Report’ is because the technology is just an extension of his brain. Speed wins in the future and a marketer has to go from concept to action with no delay in time!
As marketers, we have to stay open with our mindset and our technology in order to adapt to the ‘cool’ new technologies that we can’t predict will be the next thing.
